writer killer

Those dour author photos that look like assassins.

its own little word

Everything around us is a sub-culture, including poetry.

almost a sentence

The closer a line of poetry is to a sentence, the more power it has.

summarized

The poem’s title was a synopsis of the poem.

dissolving lines

A poem that was dissolving in the mind even before you reached the last line.

looking out

I’m more interested in poetry that looks out and around and not poetry that looks primarily within.

viewed through crystal

The surprise in the rhyme is not just a question of sound: Montale is one of the few poets who knows the secret of using rhyme to lower the tone, not to raise it, with unmistakable repercussions on meaning. Here the word ‘miracolo’ (miracle) which closes the second line is attenuated by rhyming with ‘ubriaco’ (drunk), and the whole quatrain seems to stay teetering on the edge, vibrating eerily.

[…]

My reading of “Forse un mattino’ could now be considered to have reached its conclusion. But it has sparked off inside me a series of reflections on visual perception and the appropriation of space. A poem lives on, then, also through its power to emanate hypotheses, digressions, associations of ideas in different areas, or rather to recall and hook on to itself ideas from different sources, organizing them in a mobile network of cross-references and refractions, as though viewed through a crystal.

—Italo Calvino, “Eugenio Montale, ‘Forse un mattino andando’,” Why Read the Classics? (Vintage Books, Random House, 2000).

Montale’s short poem translated by Jonathan Galassi appears in this essay by Huck Gutman.

what wells up

Too often writing a poem on a whim rather than waiting for the utterance to well up from within.

woolgathering

Poet, don’t worry over your woolgathering ways—that’s how poems get made.

do no harm

All poetry workshops should adopt the Hippocratic motto: "to help, or at least, to do no harm," shortened in Latin as, primum non nocere, ‘first, do no harm’.

welcoming all that follow

Being the first genre, poetry embraces all other genres.

game player

A parlor-game kind of poetry.

it works that way

It wasn’t the poem I meant to write, but it was the poem I did write.

trunk of a tree

When the substance of a composition, trunk of a tree, is by Truth sustained,
Style aids it to branch into leafy boughs and bear fruit.
Indeed, feeling and expression should never fail to correspond,
As each emotional change wears a new complexion on a sensitive face.
Thought that swells with joy bursts into laughter;
When grief is spoken, words reverberate with endless sighs;
No matter if the work be accomplished in one flash on the page,
Or is the result of the most deliberate brush.

—Lu Chi (261- 303), “The Working Process,” Essay on Literature (translated by Shih-Hsiang Chen), Anthology of Chinese Literature: from early times to the fourteenth century (Grove Press, 1965), edited by Cyril Birch. [This essay was written in rhymed-prose and was composed three years before Lu Chi was executed during a power struggle of the Chin court.]

jail break

Poet, make a genre jail break.

anything goes

In poetry anything is permitted, which both holds it open to discovery and stirs it into chaos.

inner workings

As with wrist watches, some poems show their mechanisms while the workings of others are covered.

lost art

Losing one’s art while striving to be recognized as an artist: Making all the right self-promotional and professional moves, but not attending to the soul-work.

hats and coats

There is such a thing as Literary Fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.

—Isaac D’Israeli, in the essay “Literary Fashions,” Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3). Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield

aphotic zone

A poem gradually settling to the bottom of one’s drafts file.

mistaken evaluation

It’s impossible for most poets to recognize that they’ve written something of little worth.

thoughtful poem

One of those I-think-this-I-think-that poems.

alive like that

Model for a poem: A late summer field full of weeds and wildflowers, visited by butterflies and birds.

is island

A poem is a language island.

perceptible disappearnances

It is poetry that remarks on the barely perceptible disappearances from our world such as that of the sleeping porch or the root cellar. And poetry that notes the barely perceptible appearances.

[…]

Poets should exceed themselves—when demands on us are slack, we should be anything but. Pressing the demands of the word forward is not only relevant but urgent. If our country does not vigorously cultivate poetry, it is either poetry’s ineluctable time to wither or time to make a promise on its own behalf to put out new shoots and insist on a much bigger pot.

—C.D. Wright, from “Collaborating,” The Essential C.D. Wright (Cooper Canyon, 2025), edited by Forrest Gander and Michael Wiegers, 119-120

me and me again

Another self-documentarian poet.

poetic power

There are poets who contained their powers, and poets who were overwhelmed by them.

face forward

A poet who wore the language mask.

he was like that

A poet who broke the rules over his knees and then chewed them with his teeth.

ends here

It’s okay to stomp on a poem to make it stop.

lonely pleasure

Often have I sighed to measure
By myself a lonely pleasure,
Sighed to think I read a book
Only read, perhaps, by me.

—William Wordsworth, “To the Small Celandine (Common Pilewort); To the Same Flower,” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, p.338

then you're in it

Best if the scene is being set without the least sound of the backdrop coming down.

afterimages

One measurement of a poem is how much memory residue it leaves behind.

word well

For a poet, each word is a well: dark, deep, full of echoes, and the faint reflection of water.

algebraic lyric

The lyric poem as an expression, an equation or an inequation (borrowing terms from algebra). As an expression, the lyric poem is a gesture, a stance, an outcry, without any particular shape or resolution. As an equation, the lyric becomes fully formed, taking shape and resolving itself. As inequation, the lyric grasps about but finds no shape or resolution in its utterance.

self-reported

As poets and artists we tend to self-report our successes and breakthroughs.

always be closing

At poetry readings, I’ve seen poets who can’t even sell a few copies after having read from their book(s). This should be a cause for concern. You should be able to close the deal in the room.

quill of smoke

           The rooftop
With a quill of smoke stuck in it
Wavers against the sky
In the dreamy heat of summer.

—Norman MacCaig, from "July Evening," The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon, 2011), edited by Ewen MacCaig

for the few

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contra beckett

Fail better? No, poet, fail more beautifully.

curse of verse

Formal poems that put perfection of form above poetic essence, fail as poems.

offer and payoff

The sonnet works by offering a promise (or hook) in the first 8 to 10 lines, and then immediately giving the reader the payoff.

fool's golden age

Now matter the glow, it’s always an iron pyrite age.

too beautiful to understand

I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the Browning poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and she could not understand.

—Carl Sandburg, from the poem "Manitoba Childe Roland"

splutter poem

So much going on verbally, you’re gonna need a bib to read this poem aloud.

write your own

You realize you haven’t lived the life to write that poem, but that’s no reason not to write your own.

[after reading a Jack Gilbert poem]

a long list

Make a list of all the antisemite artists and writers. No, don’t bother, it would be too long.

[David Markson in one of his 'non-novels' called out very many artists and writers for their antisemitism.]

only a footnote

He wrote the kind of poetry that would never accrete any lasting acclaim but might hang on for a time as a footnote.

beach reads

There are poetry books too that make for good beach reading.

same times

The feet at which I have before or after sat include those of Heidegger, Coué, Bertrand Russell, Charles Péguy, C.S. Lewis, Whately Carrington, Charles Williams, Jacques Maritain, Herbert Read, Kenneth Burke, Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Fr. [Martin Cyril] D’Arcy, Professor [Herbert] Butterfield, Gerald Heard, J.B. Priestley, J.-P. Sartre and others too numinous to mention at random. Few men can know more than I have been told about the Contemporary Crisis, the Modern Malaise, the Present Predicament, or the Dilemma of Today. None of these things (sometimes I suspect they may all be one) seems to differ radically from the problems with which, say, Ecclesiasticus, Montaigne or Leopardi was confronted.

—Daniel George, Lonely Pleasures (Jonathan Cape, 1954)

to the brim

Think of the last line as a brim not to breach. Or a brim that overflows only in the reader's mind.

uneasy at rest

A poem is uneasy even at rest.

abandonment issues

Make a list of all the artists who abandoned their spouses and children. No, don’t bother, it would be too long.

final lines

Poet, write the poem as though it will be your last.

much worse than that

A poem that had to get much worse before it could be made any better.

distillate

The poem as distilled prose.

chaotic reader

This means that I am more of a chaotic reader who often avoids the responsibilities of ownership in favor of library books, as if reading books that do not belong to me grants me some additional measure of freedom (libraries—the only arena where the socialist project has succeeded).
[...]
There's nothing terribly wrong with reading "only" poetry—but there's still a shadow of premature professionalization hanging over this practice. A shadow of shallowness.

—Adam Zagajewski, “Young Poets, Please Read Everything,” A Defense of Ardor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

revision of a kind

In making erasure/blackout poems, poets seldom turn to their own texts, but perhaps they should.

impossible to answer

Can the emotion I need to express be found in language alone?

published poet

It’s possible to publish a great deal of poetry without being a poet.

really funny

Poet, don’t be a wannabe comedian.

tested by the times

So many canonical poems that would be cut down in a workshop these days.

hard work with words

If the novelist seeks the mot propre, how much more so the poet. His words are isolated, arranged in a metrical pattern, where not only the value, or values, of each single word must be considered, but also the close interdependence of one upon the other: for every word is quick to take colour from its companion, and will gain or lose in emphasis according to its position in the line. The adjustment is very delicate, the labour painful. A lyric by Wordsworth dances gaily enough: yet that stolid figure would first pace for many days up and down the back garden, "humming and booing about", and scattering scraps of paper as he went.

—George H W Rylands, Words and Poetry (The Hogarth Press, 1928)

weighed down

Poet, let the words weigh heavy.

speak your truth

Confessionalism at its best is speaking your truth.

old new borrowed blue

For a wedding they say it’s good luck for the bride to wear ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue’. This could be the model for a good poetry reading: Read something old, read something new, read something borrowed (the generous act of reading another poet’s poem), and the blue will be evident in the reading because it’s poetry.

telling cover

There was a time in poetry publishing when you couldn’t just judge a book by its cover. Now it’s okay—no need to break open the book to read a poem or two before passing judgement.

obviously magnificent

You can’t explain the poem: you can’t say what it’s about, you can’t even make a claim for it as a poem, yet it manifests itself in the space of the page and declares itself magnificent.

not coming back

The poem was dead but I kept poking it in the ribs with my pen.

pulled out stops

A poem unimpeded by punctuation.

[Thinking of W.S. Merwin]

style is all

In Shakespeare’s later works character has grown unindividual and unreal; drama has become conventional or operatic; the words remain more tremendously, more exquisitely, more thrillingly alive than ever—the excuse and the explanation of the rest.

[...]

At last, it was simply for style that Shakespeare lived; everything else had vanished. He began as a poet, and as a poet he ended.

—Lytton Strachey, introduction to Words and Poetry (The Hogarth Press, 1928) by G H W Rylands

showed up

A poem can come unbidden, and also be unwelcome.

one and many

A poem should not be overly varied but poetry should be various in order not to bore us.

poem as brick

A poem made from mutable clay of human existence but solid as brick.

hard to read

Your layout didn’t improve the poem but it was successful in making it harder to read.